Portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona by Gustav Klimt
Earlier this year, a rare portrait by Gustav Klimt made headlines and is now under scrutiny due to a provenance hiccup. And this is not the portrait of Fräulein Lieser. This is the Austrian master’s Portrait of Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, exhibited at this year’s TEFAF Maastricht.
This year at the prestigious Dutch art fair, the Viennese gallery Wienerrothier & Kohlbacher (W&K) exhibited the portrait of the African prince with a price tag of €15 million. The painting was believed to have been lost during the Second World War and has been highly sought after by experts and collectors alike. The subject was a prince and ambassador of the Ga people of what is now the Greater Accra region of Ghana. In 1897, he traveled to Vienna to participate in an exhibition focusing on the people and customs of the West African people. However, the show mistakenly identified the prince as a member of the Ashanti rather than the Ga. This is an example of a rather strange and insensitive practice in Europe where colonized people would become the focus of “human zoos”. This was a disturbingly common practice at international gatherings like world’s fairs. The 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, for example, had a “Negro Village”, where organizers brought four hundred African people to France to live in a model village. Regardless, the African visitors to Vienna became the talk of the town, invited to all sorts of social events. Both Klimt and his friend Franz Matsch painted portraits of the prince, with the Matsch painting now on display at Luxembourg’s National Museum of Archaeology, History & Art. According to art historian Alfred Weidinger, Klimt’s portrait marks a turning point in his style. The portrait’s background features floral motifs, indicating that the artist was on his way toward embracing decorative elements in his portraiture, culminating in his Golden Phase.
W&K acquired the Klimt portrait in 2023 when a collector from Austria brought it to them from Hungary. The work was in terrible condition, but gallery specialists eventually spotted the Klimt estate stamp. The gallery acquired the painting and performed extensive restoration before its Maastricht appearance. They also reached out to the descendants of the last known owner before its disappearance. Ernestine Klein purchased the painting after the artist’s estate was auctioned off in 1923. Being Jewish, Klein escaped Vienna for Monaco in 1938 following Germany’s annexation of Austria. After that, there is little information about the painting’s whereabouts. However, W&K set up a restitution deal with the Klein descendants before bringing it to Maastricht, ensuring they would get a portion of the profits should the painting sell. But months after it first became newsworthy, the portrait is now the subject of extensive debates over how W&K acquired it.
This past weekend, the Hungarian weekly newspaper Heti Világgazdaság (HVG) claimed that the painting was previously in Hungary before W&K acquired it and that it was smuggled out of the country to bring it to Austria. However, the Austrian newspaper Der Standard published a rebuttal, claiming that the painting did receive approval from the relevant authorities to be exported. W&K also commented, dismissing HVG’s claims as nothing but “an insinuation”. The HVG article indicates that after Ernestine Klein escaped to Monaco, the portrait found its way to Hungary, where it remained in a private collection between the 1950s and 2021. However, the reports that the Klimt was smuggled out of Hungary can only be traced to a Facebook post from Hungarian art researcher Péter Molnos. Perhaps jumping the gun a bit, Molnos expressed his suspicion that a rare Klimt portrait could simply turn up again, leading him to suspect that someone illegally took the painting out of the country. Yes, it would normally take more time for cultural authorities to examine a painting of such significance before granting an export license. However, the Klimt portrait was in such poor condition that specialists likely could not make out the estate stamp.
W&K stated that while they have not yet sold the painting, they are in negotiations with an unnamed museum.